Just sent this to the geeks list:

Note: FF3 is at RC3, now, and I’ve had almost no crashing issues since RC2. The autocompletion continues to get more useful as I think of new ways to use it. For example:

• Typing in the numerical address of any place I’ve visited in Google maps (e.g. “555″) brings up the map for that location.
• Typing a search term that I’ve used before brings up a list of all Google queries that I’ve made containing that search term.
• Typing words in subject lines of Gmail messages I’ve viewed also brings those up.

~e

P.S. I’m seriously concerned at this point that if I lost access to Google, I’d end up blind, deaf, and dumb, mumbling in some alleyway God-knows-where.

Having not read the session description ahead of time, I was expecting this to be all about browser hacking in the narrow sense: specific tricks, workarounds, and hacks. Instead, it was a much more interesting talk about why this approach to feature development is vital to the web itself.

We are in the midst of an incredible acceleration in the variety of technologies vying to serve as our interface to the cloud. Dillard did a great job characterizing the forces at play (standard vs proprietary, open vs. closed.) He then explained the complicated role that technical hacks play in this ecosystem, since they can both allow developers to adopt standards before browsers support them, and at the same time push the standards themselves (treading dangerously in the territory of proprietary feature sets.)

His advice to developers boiled down to this: Don’t wait for standards, but hack as dangerously close as you can to the bleeding edge of where you think the open web is headed. The most valuable hacks are the ones that bring future standards to today’s (and yesterday’s) browsers.

Do Try This at Home: Ajax Bookmarking, Cross-site Scripting, and Other Web 2.0 Browser Hacks
Development, room 2003, Friday 3:50 PM
Brian Dillard (Pathfinder Associates)

My rough notes are after the jump.

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This was the one-year follow-up after Steve Souders did his first presentation (at last year’s Web 2.0) on optimizing the performance of frontends. He’s done some amazing work collecting best practices, including a whole decision tree on the best methods to inject script into a page, based on browsers, the need to access scripts cross-domain, etc.

As far as immediate applicability to my work at Instructables, this was by far the most interesting talk of the conference for me. Rough notes after the jump.

Even Faster Web Sites
Focus on Web Operations, room 2002, Friday 1:30 PM
Steve Souders (Google)

Here’s a link to the slides. As a preview, below is the money shot: a full decision tree for how and when to use any one of six different methods for dynamic script inclusion:

In addition, I had a very interesting conversation with badass engineer/analyst Artur Bergman who has suggested some ninja moves to get us past the the external script loading problems that we’re having at Instructables. I’d previously been stumped, so this may be something of a coup.

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This was a great talk by Gregg Pollack, who’s a big Ruby on Rails evangelist. Here, he makes his case for TDD (Test-Driven Development) in general, and a new form of it called BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) which he hearts. The live-coding was fun (it always seems fun, with Rails) but it made for some very bad note-taking. Fortunately, I found a video online with similar content, so you can watch for yourself.

This doesn’t have immediate application at Instructables, though I’ll be looking into BDD and TDD systems that have been developed for frontend code. Rough notes and links after the jump.

The Art of Testing Web Applications
Thurs 2:40 PM, Development 2003
Gregg Pollack (Rails Envy)

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This was a session by Matt Jones (Dopplr) and Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse / fire eagle) on the past, present, and future of “data portability” and other ways in which users experience and give access to their personal data. They discussed a lot of interesting design patterns that are fundamental to our current phase of innovation. These are interactions and metaphors that don’t always come to mind when people think of the superficial aspects of Web 2.0. Rough notes after the jump.

Polite, Pertinent, and… Pretty: Designing for the New-wave of Personal Informatics
Design and User Experience 2006 Wed 9:40 AM
Matt Jones (Dopplr), Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse / fire eagle)

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A very False Profit topic will be discussed at this week’s “Journal Club”: the idea that capitalist patterns can somehow be applied to eliminating poverty at a higher rate than capitalism in its current incarnation. It starts in about fifteen minutes; I’ll post notes here, later. For now, here are links to our required reading:

• An essay by Muhammed Yunus
• Bill Gates’ speech at Davos (or, watch it on Youtube)
• there’s also a William Easterly critique of the Bill Gates speech that I’ll link to, soon

Update: I may or may not be able to write more about this. David Grosof, our extremely overeducated presenter, rattled off ideas and manged discussion at a rate that I didn’t even try to capture in note form. Most likely, interested parties will have to catch me in person to start up the discusison. I’ve included his initial prompt for discussion, after the jump.

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Firms and students developing buildings and other structures using the ubiquitous shipping container. Listed from A-Z.

I’ve been consuming TED talks at a fairly rapid pace for a year now, and they keep on coming. As I’ve been going along, I’ve been capturing brief notes on the ones that I’ve found interesting. Going forward, I’m going to post small batches here. This is mostly for my own reference, but maybe the internets will also find them useful.

Here are the first three (you can see all of them here):

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

I rolled my eyes a couple times as he was introducing his topic, but as the talk went on, most of my skepticism was addressed, and then I was totally absorbed. He seems to have found many instances where fractal math was consciously used in African culture for very practical engineering and cultural purposes. He has also found that this conscious use of fractals is not present in other non-state societies. He finishes his talk by mentioning how these cultural uses can actually be used in the US to show African-American students that their heritage includes a rich mathematical history, as well.

Matthieu Ricard: Habits of happiness

A Quebecois molecular biologist-turned monk relates the basics of Buddhism, from a Westerner’s point of view. This talk is simple and straightforward, they way I like my explanations of Buddhism. There is a good balance here that represents my belief in mindfulness practice: part subjective experience, part science.

Amory Lovins: We must win the oil endgame

Author of the book Winning the Oil Endgame sees the path to an oil-import-free U.S. as a profitable, not a costly one. His ideas are comprehensive, including new materials for making cars lighter, “feebates” to change buying incentives per weight class of car (rather than between them), and an overall focus on efficiency. The latter one is interesting, as he makes those savings clear by pricing efficiency in terms of $/barrel of oil displaced. He is very glib with his free-market cheerleading, however, and explain very well why profit motives haven’t already pushed our industries to make these changes on their own. Some of his comments about the military wanting to defend America rather than oil pipelines in foreign countries are incredibly naive; it’s not our people on the ground who make policy, it’s the politicians who are financially bound to arms manufacturers.

Again, you can see all of the ted talk notes, here.

So, with my very old Motorola RAZR on its last legs (I got sand in it, somehow) and my T-Mobile contract up, I decided to get the new Helio Ocean. I won’t get into all the aches and pains of my first few days with it. In a nutshell: childish anticipation as my new toy was shipped, then disappointment due to various glitches during activation. Now, I’m developing a love for the Ocean once again, as I learn to overcome some of its bad user interfaces and get it to do what I want it to.

Case in point: Synchronizing contacts with a Mac is a pain in the ass, but I’ve mapped it out, below. There are tons of crippled features on the phone (restricted bluetooth services, blocked network bridging, no calendar sync with Macs, saccharine ringtones, etc.) These are the rage-inducing par for the course, with American service providers. I haven’t found workarounds for most of these, yet, but I did figure out this one. Other Mac users might save some effort by piggybacking on my efforts.

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In a series of prior blog posts, I fleshed out three of the talks that were most relevant to my work at Instructables. There were many other good presentations that I saw and conversations that I had, but time is running out for me to post them. So, after the jump, you’ll find the remainder of my notes, unedited. These are all from Wednesday, April 18th. They may be useful to someone, at some point, so I post them here as an offering to the global indexing gods.

Highlights:

• Squid labs represent! Both Christy Canida (Instructables) and Colin Bulthaup (Potenco) were chosen to present five-minute talks at the Expo keynote. Christy did a great presentation about the “K’nex kids,” an emergent community on Instructables. Colin presented Potenco’s ideas on small-scale human power, the “wireless” power source that the developing world needs to match its wireless communications.
• Alex Chaffee and Leslie Chicoine had a great presentation about Agile software development, and how designers can be brought into the mix.
• Fred Von Lohmann surveyed the legal landscape around how Web 2.0 companies fit into the four traditional DMCA “Safe Harbors.” (And to mix the metaphors further, Fred preferred calling these sections of the DMCA “Islands” rather than “Safe Harbors.”)

The full set of (rough) notes, including notes for these and other talks, are after the jump.

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